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Building Our House (2013)

by Jonathan Bean(Favorite Author)

4.16 of 5 Votes: 3

ISBN

0374380236 (ISBN13: 9780374380236)

languge

English

genre

Middle Grade & Children's

publisher

Farrar Straus Giroux

review 1: I would call this informational biography. The story is drawn from Bean's life, although his narrator is the unnamed little girl. Heavy nostalgia permeates the entire telling, making building your own home with no other place to live seem like the most idyllic thing any family could do. It draws on a tradition of this theme that reaches out to the Little House books, Walden, and others. The cartoon outlines give the book a graphic novel feel, or Virginia Lee Burton. Bean controls the pacing by breaking up the spreads into 1, 2, 4, 6 sections. Just when things are really complicated in six sections, the next double is a wide expanse of one picture and one text block again, slowing things down for a long visual experience. Right in the center of the story is a great reproduc... moretion of a blueprint. There is a gentle complementary narrative running through the illustrations if you watch the kids, the pets, and the mom. So while the text is almost completely corresponding to the pictures, the pictures offer a little more.
review 2: This book is a fantastic overview for preschoolers of the steps of building one's home from scratch by hand. There's a sweet surprise and sub-story to look out for in the illustrations, too. I liked it even better when I turned to the last page and saw photos of the author's childhood. It's a true story! My eight-year-old desperately wants to move to the woods and build his own home, and this book was a great starting point for him as he began to sort out how one goes about doing such a big task. Really, every little one should know how the buildings around them got there, and this book is a way to get that orienting data into them early and easily. less

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